Italian in Manhattan

Since World War II, U.S. galleries and museums have had a hard time keeping up with the outpourings of the bustling Italian art world. Last week a Manhattan gallery got around to giving one of Italy's best young sculptors, 38-year-old Pericle Fazzini (TIME, May 7), his first U.S. show. Fazzini's American debut proved once more that where the human figure is concerned, Italy's present-day sculptors are as interesting as they come.

"I want to make statues," says Fazzini, "which seem to ascend to heaven, sculptures which express the prayers and sacrifices of men in the face of infinite time and infinite space." For all his high aspirations, most of the Fazzinis on display were pleasantly down-to-earth. They were studies of athletes and dancers in double-jointed poses, modeled with a sure hand and a quick eye.

Fazzini at his more serious was harder to take. The Prophet, which Fazzini himself considers one of his best statues, was a grim, slope-shouldered figure in coarse-grained pearwood, as ungainly as his other work was agile. Fazzini explains it as "architecture in the form of a man--the attempt of man to become more pure, and to rise from the material to the spiritual."

Nowadays Fazzini has little time for such expressionistic experiments. Last week he was hard at work in Rome supervising casting on his current project, a 7,000,000-lira traditional-style altarpiece in honor of Mother Cabrini for the Church of Saint Eugenius. "The church is still attached to tradition," he said. "I made some concessions."

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